Pragmatic Existentialism

A philosophical essay.

by Don Dugger

---

Update May 31, 2026

Toward a Pragmatic Existentialism of Consciousness

I have been developing a philosophical view that I think of as a form of pragmatic existentialism. It is not a finished system, and I do not present it as a final answer to consciousness, reality, or human existence. It is instead an attempt to bring together several questions that have troubled me for much of my life:

• What is consciousness?
• What does it mean to experience a world?
• How does memory shape reality?
• What is the self?
• What is agency?

And how can finite human beings live meaningfully inside a reality that may be far larger than we can ever fully comprehend?

The thought I keep returning to is this:

Consciousness does not merely observe a world. Consciousness may participate in the formation of a finite, livable world within a larger reality.

I do not mean that consciousness magically creates the external world. The world clearly resists us. We cannot walk through walls. Physics works. Matter behaves with consistency. There is something outside my private experience.

But at the same time, I do not have direct access to total reality. I only experience reality as it is filtered through my body, senses, brain, memory, language, emotions, and history. What I experience is not reality in its totality. It is a selected and structured version of reality — a world made livable for a being like me.

The Flashlight and the Room

One metaphor that helps me is the image of a flashlight in a dark room.

Reality is the room. Consciousness is the flashlight. The flashlight does not create the room, but it only illuminates part of it. What is outside the beam is not necessarily unreal, but it is not directly available.

Different conscious beings may have different flashlights. A human, a dog, a bat, a jellyfish, and a jumping spider may not simply see the same world in different levels of detail. They may inhabit different experiential worlds because their senses, memories, needs, and forms of life are different.

A bat’s world is shaped by echolocation.

A dog’s world is shaped strongly by smell.

A human world is shaped by memory, language, imagination, and self-reflection.

A jellyfish, if it has any experience at all, may inhabit a world radically different from ours.

This means that consciousness is not simply a passive window. It selects. It organizes. It stabilizes. It creates reference.

Reference and Distinction

One idea I keep coming back to is that consciousness depends on distinction.

To experience anything, there must be some separation between this and that, self and world, before and after, presence and absence. Without distinction, nothing stands out. Without something standing out, there is no reference. And without reference, there may be no meaningful experience at all.

This connects to the idea that consciousness may not be one single thing. There may be layers or forms of consciousness.

At one level, there may be simple organism-world distinction. A living thing must in some way distinguish itself from its environment in order to stay alive.

At another level, there is sensation or basic experience.

At another level, memory creates continuity.

At a still higher level, self-consciousness appears — the strange ability of consciousness to become aware of itself. This is what I sometimes think of as the eye that sees itself.

Memory and Time

Memory has become central to my thinking.

I do not think memory is merely storage. Memory may be one of the structures that makes a world possible.

If I look at a chair, I only see one side of it. Yet I experience it as a whole chair. I infer the back, the legs, the weight, the use, and the hidden sides. That inference depends on memory, past experience, and learned patterns.

The flashlight metaphor becomes stronger here. The flashlight illuminates only one part of the room at a time. But as I move the flashlight, memory lets me retain what I have already seen. I can begin to build a model of the room. I never see the entire room all at once, but memory allows me to construct a larger world than the present beam alone reveals.

Memory also seems deeply connected to time. Without some form of retention, how could there be an experience of before and after? How could there be change? How could there be causality?

Even a simple reaction seems to imply persistence. If an organism reacts to a condition, there must be some retained structure that allows the condition to matter. Even an “if-then” structure implies order: if this condition occurs, then this response follows.

This suggests that retention may be far more fundamental than ordinary memory. Before autobiographical memory, before stories about the self, there may be simpler forms of persistence: biological, cellular, neural, behavioral. Life itself may depend on retention across time.

Life as Self-Maintaining Organization

This brings me to the question of life.

A living thing is not merely matter sitting passively in the world. A living thing maintains itself. It preserves a boundary. It regulates itself. It responds to conditions. It resists dissolution.

At the most basic level, life may be matter organized around its own continuation.

That does not mean molecules “want” to live in the human sense. But self-maintaining structures can persist, replicate, repair, and adapt. Evolution then amplifies those forms of persistence.

Over time, this may produce:

retention, memory, prediction, agency, consciousness, imagination, and eventually reflective selfhood.

In human beings, this ancient self-maintaining structure becomes inwardly felt. It becomes desire, fear, care, love, hope, grief, and the will to live.

This may be one way to understand why life matters to itself.

Agency and Free Will

This has changed the way I think about free will.

The usual question is often stated like this:

If everything were exactly the same, could I have chosen differently?

That question has always troubled me. If everything were exactly the same, then my love, fear, memory, empathy, imagination, fatigue, attention, and values would also be exactly the same. But those are not irrelevant to the choice. They are part of how I choose.

I do not think free will means action without causes. That seems incoherent. But I also do not think conscious agency is meaningless.

A better way to think about free will may be this:

Free will is the capacity of a conscious being to use memory, imagination, value, and self-reflection to shape action under uncertainty.

Imagination is especially important.

Memory gives us a past.

Perception gives us a present.

Imagination gives us possible futures.

When I imagine an outcome and allow that imagined future to guide my action, something important is happening inside consciousness. Even if that process is part of causality, it is not trivial. It is one of the ways causality moves through a conscious being.

So perhaps freedom is not escape from causality. Perhaps freedom is a richer form of participation in causality.

Determinism, Randomness, and the Limits of Consciousness

This also affects how I think about determinism and randomness.

If some total standpoint existed — a complete view of all causes, all physical states, all laws, and all future consequences — then perhaps determinism could be meaningful at that level.

But no finite conscious being has that standpoint.

Consciousness lives inside partial knowledge. The future is not fully available to us. From within conscious life, uncertainty is real. We do not experience the future as fixed and known. We experience possible futures, imagined futures, feared futures, hoped-for futures.

This does not necessarily prove that randomness is ultimate in reality. But it does mean that unpredictability is real for consciousness.

Agency exists inside that uncertainty.

Essence as a Product of Experience

Another part of this philosophy concerns essence.

When I look at a chair I have never seen before, I still recognize it as a chair. That fascinates me. There is something like “chairness” involved.

But I do not think chairness must be a fixed essence existing somewhere outside experience. Nor is it simply arbitrary. A chair is not just anything I decide to call a chair.

Instead, chairness may emerge through repeated embodied experience.

A child encounters many things: stools, benches, dining chairs, rocking chairs, office chairs, thrones, folding chairs. Over time, the mind forms a pattern. That pattern includes shape, function, use, bodily relation, cultural meaning, memory, and language.

So essence may not come before existence in the old sense. Essence may be formed through repeated encounters with existence.

A possible way to say this is:

Essence is a stabilized pattern of meaning created through memory, use, embodiment, and repeated experience.

This fits with existentialism, especially the idea that existence precedes essence. But it also connects with modern ideas about learning, pattern recognition, and neural networks.

The brain may form meaning by encountering many instances, retaining patterns, and stabilizing categories. At higher levels, those categories become part of our experienced world.

Other Minds and Shared Worlds

There is also the problem of other minds.

I know my own experience from the inside. I know another person’s experience only from the outside. I see behavior, language, facial expression, action, and emotion. But I cannot directly experience another person’s qualia — their redness of red, their pain, their joy, their inner life.

Yet from a very early age, we seem to treat others as conscious. We do not usually reason our way into believing other people have minds. We experience them as minded.

This may be another structure of consciousness: not only object-reference, but subject-reference. Human beings do not merely see bodies. We see someone.

This allows shared worlds to emerge. Through language, empathy, memory, and culture, separate conscious beings create overlapping worlds of meaning.

But these worlds are never perfectly identical. My experience of red may not be exactly like yours. My dyslexic brain may structure parts of experience differently than another person’s brain. A traumatized person, a loved person, a fearful person, a hopeful person — each may inhabit a differently structured world.

This makes empathy philosophically important. Empathy is not merely kindness. It may be an attempt to cross between partially separate worlds.

Consciousness and the World

At this point, I find myself dissatisfied with the usual categories.

Dualism says mind and matter are separate.

Materialism says consciousness is produced by matter.

Idealism says reality is fundamentally mind.

But I am beginning to suspect another possibility.

Perhaps consciousness and world are not two separate substances that must somehow be connected. Perhaps conscious experience and worldhood arise together through relationship.

Consciousness is not outside reality. If consciousness is fundamental in any way, it must be part of reality. It is not a ghost floating above the world. It is one way reality becomes inwardly present.

This does not mean all reality is mind. It means the world as experienced may require consciousness, while consciousness itself requires a world to appear within.

Perhaps consciousness and world are inseparable aspects of lived reality.

The Remaining Mystery

Even after all this, the deepest problem remains.

What is consciousness?

I can describe what consciousness does. It selects, remembers, imagines, values, predicts, stabilizes, and creates reference. It builds a livable world.

But that still does not explain why experience exists at all.

Why does blue feel like blue?

Why does pain hurt?

Why does love matter?

Why is there something it is like to be alive?

This is the hard problem. And I do not claim to have solved it.

But I do think this framework helps clarify the terrain.

Consciousness may not be merely behavior. Behavior can be observed from the outside. Consciousness is presence from the inside.

A machine may act as though it sees blue. Another person may act as though they see blue. But the actual experience of blue is interior. This gap may never be fully closed from the outside.

That is why consciousness remains so difficult.

A Working Statement

The current form of my thinking might be summarized this way:

Consciousness is the finite, living process through which reality becomes experienceable as a world. It does this through distinction, reference, memory, value, imagination, and agency. Conscious beings do not access total reality directly. They inhabit selected, structured, and partially overlapping worlds shaped by their bodies, histories, memories, and forms of life.

I do not know if this is correct. I do not know how much of it has already been said better by philosophers, neuroscientists, phenomenologists, or biologists.

But I think there is something here worth exploring.

At minimum, this view suggests that consciousness should not be treated as a trivial illusion or a meaningless byproduct. Consciousness may be central to how life becomes aware of a world, how memory becomes time, how imagination becomes possibility, how agency becomes action, and how existence becomes meaningful.

Perhaps consciousness does not simply exist inside a world.

Perhaps consciousness is part of how a world becomes livable.